Lady Gregory

“It was on the first day of Beltaine, that is called now May Day, the Tuatha de Danaan came, and it was to the north-west of Connacht they landed. But the Firbolgs, the Men of the Bag, that were in Ireland before them, and that had come from the South, saw nothing but a mist, and it lying on the hills.”

“What makes Ireland inclined toward the drama is that it's a great country for conversation.”

“There is lasting kindness in Heaven when no kindness is found upon earth.”

“When I was a child and came with my elders to Galway for their salmon fishing in the river that rushes past the gaol, I used to look with awe at the window where men were hung, and the dark, closed gate.”

“It is not known, now, for what length of time the Tuatha de Danaan had the sway over Ireland, and it is likely it was a long time they had it, but they were put from it at last.”

“There is no sin coveting things are of no great use or profit, but would show out good and have some grandeur around them.”

“It takes madness to find out madness.”

“The Gaelic language itself depends very much on ear and rhythm, and when those who are thinking in Gaelic speak in English, they get the same rhythm.”

“It is not always them that has the most that makes the most show.”

“From the sons of Ith, the first of the Gael to get his death in Ireland, there came in the after time Fathadh Canaan, that got the sway over the whole world from the rising to the setting sun, and that took hostages of the streams and the birds and the languages.”

“I feel more and more the time wasted that is not spent in Ireland.”

“Every day in the year there comes some malice into the world, and where it comes from is no good place.”

“I don't know in the world why anyone would consent to be a king, and never to be left to himself, but to be worried and wearied and interfered with from dark to daybreak and from morning to the fall of night.”

“Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible.”

“In my childhood there was every year at my old home, Roxborough, or, as it is called in Irish, Cregroostha, a great sheep-shearing that lasted many days. On the last evening there was always a dance for the shearers and their helpers, and two pipers used to sit on chairs placed on a corn-bin to make music for the dance.”

“I don't think Ireland has ever had a genius for the novel. Of course, there were plenty of Irish novels, but I don't think that was ever the natural means of expression for the Irish.”

“The first play I wrote was called 'Twenty-five.' It was played by our company in Dublin and London, and was adapted and translated into Irish and played in America.”

“What are prophecies? Don't we hear them every day of the week? And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.”

“What the Danes left in Ireland were hens and weasels. And when the cock crows in the morning, the country people will always say 'It is for Denmark they are crowing. Crowing they are to be back in Denmark.'”

“It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.”